The Covenant #1 (Image Comics)

No story summation this time, so let’s just get straight to the point: The Covenant #1 is a troubled issue. On the surface, the comic doesn’t seem too bad. It’s a story about the Ark of Covenant and the Israelites that takes place between some of the stories from the Old Testament. Nothing wrong about that and it can lead to a potentially interesting ride, since the first issue is entirely setup and giving a Bible lecture. The thing about it though is the fact that the more you analyze it and focus, the more the flaws of the comic appear.

The first thing is the story itself. It’s unfortunately very boring and dully executed. Not much happens in the issue outside of the basic setup and a very brief teaser of what is to come at the beginning of the comic. It’s mostly just the characters giving a lot of exposition in rather off-sounding ways, establishing how evil the villains are, and a six-page lecture about the history of Israelites once they left Egypt. That last part is good for context (not everyone has had to read the Bible like I did), but the narration is very dry and it feels like it is being recited out of a textbook. I ultimately understand the importance of setup, but the comic just made it so dully presented and it really didn’t offer much to hook you in.

The writing is problematic as well. The story structure has some poor transitions with random cuts and it doesn’t signal at what time a scene is taking place. What I mean by that is that the comic opens up with some characters in the future (but there’s no indication of that being the case) as they are about to storm a city and then after the history lesson, we see one of the characters again but it’s supposed to be taking place in the past (no indication of that either and the character is wearing the exact same clothing). This oddity was rather baffling to say the least when reading the book and made me wonder what happened. The dialogue ranges from being exposition heavy with very little character to being stilted and unnatural sounding, adding to the boredom since it’ll make it hard to get fully invested in what the people are talking about. The pacing is a bit slow, but nothing too bad all things considered. It’s reasonable and gives the scenes plenty of time to make their point before moving on. Honestly though, this isn’t something all that good or impressive.

The artwork is done by Mat Horak and while he isn’t a terrible artist, he’s kind of an average one. He’s average in the sense that while none of his work shown in the book is poorly drawn or displayed (most of the time at least), there’s nothing he draws that’s particularly captivating or memorable here. His characters are perfectly acceptable, even though some musculature looks off in areas, and his layouts are fine and work well enough. However, the action is unremarkable, the colors are drab, and there’s no visually interesting things to look at. It’s all just kind of bland looking from start to finish.

Is It Good?

The Covenant #1 is boring. There’s nothing wrong with the premise or what the story wants to do, but every other little thing about the comic is either badly written, poorly executed, or incredibly dull. If you want to read a Biblical epic, like this seems to want to be, I’m sure there are better options out there even ignoring the actual Bible. This though? Not really worth your time ultimately and it’s best left skipped.